by Willa Hart
“How long have you been in Turdzi?”
“What’s your goal?”
“Who’s your dragon?”
“Where’s your dragon? Have you lost him?”
“Has he lost you?”
“Why do you still follow Vazha’s teachings when he’s been dead for two hundred years?” Mariam asked, leaning in close to Levan’s face.
“Who do you follow now? A dragon?”
They continued peppering the prisoner with questions he refused to answer. Every once in a while, he’d react, with an eye roll or a grin or a snort, but he gave no real answers. Most of the time he simply looked bored. And maybe a little strung out.
After a half-hour of getting nowhere, Mariam swept a hand through her beautiful hair and shot a look at me. With a deep sigh, she caught Levan’s eye again.
“Where’s the human female called Zoe Walsman?”
“Who?” he asked, but we all knew the question had touched a nerve.
It had been the first one he’d actually paid attention to, and then his eyes had flicked over toward me for the briefest second. He was quick to paint the bored look back on his face, but his immediate response and that glimmer in his eyes spoke volumes. He knew something, that much was obvious.
Mariam groaned, the same bit of understanding settling hard on her psyche. I could almost see the war inside her head, trying to decide whether she should pursue the lead or ignore it out of spite. Luka looked over at her and gave her a subtle nod. She sighed and went to work.
“Okay, cockroach. Maybe we can make a deal.”
“Deal for what?” he sneered.
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re a keeper without a dragon, right?”
He tried to maintain eye contact with her, but something made him drop his gaze first, admitting the truth without speaking.
“That can’t be comfortable for you. You must feel so empty inside. Lost at sea, totally directionless, no?”
No, I thought, relating her words to my own situation. I didn’t have a dragon — okay, I had five, but I wasn’t keeper to any of them. Yet I didn’t feel directionless in the slightest, and forget about feeling empty!
“We can bring you into our weir,” she continued. “There’s such a shortage of good keepers, I bet you’d have no trouble finding one within our ranks.”
Luka jumped in. “We can find you a nice house to live in. Much nicer than this one. We’ll help you get back on your feet again, integrate you back into our society.”
“Are you hungry? You look hungry, Levan. If you join us, we’ll make sure you never go hungry again.”
“We’ll do all of that for you, Levan,” Mariam said, bestowing the most beautiful smile on the guy. “And we’re not asking much in return, a trifle really. All you’ll need to do is rejoin your group for a while, pretend everything is the same as its always been, then you report back to us. Easy!”
Levan’s dark, soulless eyes bounced between them for a moment, considering their offer. Then his face split into an evil grin.
“Fuck off.”
Luka’s hands clenched into tight fists as his body grew taller and broader, straining the seams of his now-too-tight clothes. His body vibrated with barely restrained power and snorts of acrid smoke curled up from his elongated face that wasn’t quite a snout. Yet. As terrifying as the display was to me, Levan seemed more amused than anything.
“You think that kind of show scares me, dragon scum? I deal with meaner dragons every single day.”
Mariam bent down low into the guy’s face, jabbing her finger into his ashen cheek. “Let’s get one thing very, very clear, Levan. You have never met a meaner dragon than me. And I am inches — inches — from proving it to you.”
Truth was, I was pretty pissed off by that time too. He had no fear, no reason to crack, even under immense pressure. No chance was he going to give up any info on Zoe the old-fashioned way. Maybe it was time to go for unorthodox.
I’d tracked dragons and keepers and humans, and communicated telepathically over great distances and in worse circumstances than this. Maybe it was time to take a peek inside this dickwad’s undoubtedly disgusting mind. I had to try, if only on the off chance I could find a clue about Zoe.
While Luka and Mariam continued berating and intimidating their captive, I closed my eyes, took a slow breath, and descended calmly into my vision state. Focusing on Levan, I prodded at his mind delicately, gently, testing his ability to block me. When he opened to me like big garage door rolling up, I was shocked.
Levan was surprisingly weak. Underneath his godless, tough exterior, he was vulnerable, barely clinging to a thread of sanity. His arrogance was a facade, a bluff. This would be like taking candy from a meth-addled baby.
I slipped inside his head, unnerved by the strangeness of poking around someone else’s consciousness. It was like reading his diary times a thousand, yet…not. Instead of fully formed stories, waiting for me to watch, most of what I saw were impressions of things. Flashes of sensation and memory. His brain was full of static. Fuzz, but with clips of home movies.
Levan smiling up into the loving faces of his parents. Levan wrapping his arms around his little sister in a tight embrace. Levan, now a little older, leaning in for his first kiss, interlacing his fingers with the soft hand of a neighbor girl. A teenage Levan talking to a much older dragon keeper who gave me the chills.
After that, the snippets of memories grew darker and less defined. Flashes of dragons fighting, all fangs and talons, clashing in clouds of smoke and blinding licks of flame. Bone-chilling screams of the people he held dearest but couldn’t save. Then everything went dark, with only the faintest flicker of static coming through, as though no more memories had been created after that dark, hellacious day when he lost his family.
I pulled myself back to reality, irritated that I didn’t get a single glimpse of Zoe, or anything recent, for that matter. Luka stood over the melot, face red, eyes bulging, screaming at him.
“Answer me, melot scum!”
I’d had enough of the bad-cop-bad-cop routine. Throwing caution to the wind, I broke my promise and pushed past Luka and Mariam until I stood over Levan, my whole body bristling with energy and rage.
“Tell me what you know about Zoe!”
Levan continued to stare at the ground for several moments, then his black eyes slowly rose to meet mine. A flash of bright white blinded me, like when someone takes a picture when you aren’t expecting it, then a vision came hurtling out of the dark and struck me down with such intensity the world ceased to exist.
I swam to the surface of consciousness to find the dizzying image of Kellum and Mariam staring down at me. I tried to think. I tried to speak. Nothing seemed to be working, and then I was being sucked back down into the abyss, into the blackness. Before it enveloped me in its comforting embrace, my final vision was of the pair of them, and the final thought that drifted off into the darkness with me was what beautiful babies they would make together.
Chapter 8
“Are you certain you’re up to it?” Kellum asked as he kneeled in front of me and searched my face for signs of uncertainty.
I took his face in my hands and pressed my lips to his, letting him feel for himself how fine I was. I pulled away and brushed my thumb against his cheek.
“I’m sure. I passed out, that’s all.”
Ryen sat next to me on the ratty old sofa in the downstairs living room area. “You passed out after jumping into the mind of a drug-addled melot, Favor. Twice, actually.”
I vaguely recalled waking up for a brief minute or less, then falling back down the rabbit hole created by Levan’s twisted mind. Only it hadn’t always been twisted. He’d once been a normal kid from a happy family, then something had happened to darken his world into the bleak, blank landscape I witnessed. The experience had left my head spinning, like I’d just stepped off the world’s most curlicued roller coaster and my body didn’t know how to handle it.
Apparently, Luka a
nd Mariam had dragged my limp ass downstairs after I’d collapsed in front of Levan. They’d laid me on the small sofa, where I’d almost come to, then fell back into unconsciousness. I’d only been out ten minutes, tops, but the guys were acting as though I’d almost died.
So when Tamar had suggested we pay a visit to her grandmother on the way back to our hideout, the guys pushed back, saying I needed to rest for the rest of the day. Maybe they forgot how stubborn I was.
“Listen,” I said, giving them all a warm smile to show how much I appreciated their concern, but I laced it with obvious determination so they’d know how serious I was. “We’re obviously not going to get anything more out of Levan, and until I can remember what happened to knock me out, I think talking to the weir’s oldest living dragon could shed some light.”
“On what?” Danic asked, his lips pursed tight in disapproval of my plan.
I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Luka stepped forward. “Mariam will join you.”
“Why?” Tamar said, frowning.
“Because I want to know what you find out.”
“You think I won’t tell you?”
Luka sighed heavily and skimmed the crowd of people watching him. He leaned in so he could murmur in his sister’s ear but he spoke loudly enough for us to hear. Unfortunately, he said it in Romanian, which none of us understood. Tamar rolled her eyes in response, then shrugged and led us out to her SUV.
This time I rode shotgun, with Mariam snuggled between Kellum and Danic, and Ryen and the twins in the rear. It was cozy but Mariam didn’t seem to mind. Once we were rolling through the village, I turned to Tamar.
“Mind if I ask what Luka said to you back there?” I didn’t normally pry into private conversations between siblings, but I figured it was fair game since we’d been the subject.
She gave me an apologetic smile. “Luka is very protective of our weir,” she said in her perfect, if slightly stilted English. “He wanted Mariam there as extra insurance since you’re all outsiders.”
“Insurance against what exactly?”
“Treachery,” Mariam hissed with a smile, but I could tell she wasn’t really joking.
So could the others, judging by the tension that filled the rig. To deflect the awkwardness, I figured a change of subject was in order.
“Just how old is your grandmother, Tamar?”
“Dragons do not pay as close attention to age as humans,” she explained carefully. “Not in the same way, at least. It would be like if you tracked how many months old you are.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere,” Ryen said from the back.
Tamar smiled. “But I have picked up what I think you call ‘clues’ over the years. She once told me that when she was a fledgling, the local humans had some violent disputes over whether her family’s homeland would remain under Persian or Byzantine rule. If she has one too many tuicas, she likes to brag that she was on the front lines of the Battle of Adrianople, but I don’t believe it.”
Having earned my high school diploma in the American public school system, I had almost no clue on Romania’s history, especially its wars, but I was pretty sure tuica had to be some kind of booze.
“You think she’s lying?” Ash asked.
“Oh no, she is certainly old enough that the Goths could have left lambs out as peace offerings to her parents. In fact, I believe she is the oldest dragon in Europe, maybe the world. I simply do not think she would have noticed. Dragon society has not always been as integrated with humans as it is now.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting her,” I said, turning to stare at seemingly ancient buildings whizzing past.
To be so old that you watched them being built seemed impossible to me. How did someone carry around so many memories without their brain exploding? I could barely recall what I had for dinner the night before. The very thought scrambled my brain, even more than it already was.
But the fog that had stuck with me since I woke the second time seemed to be lifting a bit. Every minute we drove, the more the details came clear. It was sort of like a jigsaw puzzle and my mind was snapping pieces in as it found them, but that final picture remained fractured and a total mystery.
A big hand rested on my shoulder, jerking me out of my thoughts. Danic. He squeezed gently.
“You okay, babe? You just went silent.”
I reached up and squeezed his hand. “Oh, I was just trying to remember everything I saw in Levan’s memories.”
“Want to share with the class what you do remember?” he asked as he sat back in his seat.
I’d hesitated sharing at the house because most of it was a blur. A couple of irrelevant snatches of childhood, but the time had come to spill every detail I could recall. Maybe it would jog loose the rest.
“Not a lot,” I said, half-turning in my seat to face them all.
As my gaze landed on Mariam sitting so close to Kellum, a tightness formed in my stomach that I couldn’t explain. I ignored it and launched into what I’d seen during my foray into the melot’s mind. That had crystallized clearly enough to offer up most of the details.
“Seems he had a happier upbringing than most of us in this vehicle,” Hale said, which gave us all pause for a few seconds.
“But at some point in his life, things went terribly wrong,” I pointed out. “I couldn’t see clearly what happened, but I got the sense it was legit bad. Then everything went fuzzy and dark.”
“Ah, good ol’ repression at work,” Ryen said, scratching at his beard — it had grown from a stylish “scruff” to a full beard since we’d left L.A. It suited him. “Did you see anything about him having a crush on his mom?”
I made a face at him. “No, Dr. Freud, but thanks for the insight into your psyche. Frankly, I’m shocked I read anything off him at all. It was my first time trying anything like that, you know.”
“And you did great,” Kellum said, giving me a quick wink.
Mariam and Tamar listened without speaking. Tamar knew about some of my unusual talents, so she didn’t seem too shocked, but Mariam’s big green eyes were wide with interest.
“So was that fuzzy darkness what caused you to faint?” Ash asked, trying hard to keep the worry out of his voice, but I felt it all the way in the front of the SUV.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and thinking back. “I’d come out of my vision state, or whatever it’s called, by then. I don’t remember much after that, just a few fragments.”
“Mariam,” Tamar said in Balaur, “you were there. What did you see?”
Mariam glanced around at us, a demur smile playing at her perfect lips. “My apologies, I do not speak English.”
Ryen shrugged. “Meh, it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“I wasn’t paying attention to Favor while we interrogated the melot. We were getting nowhere anyway, so when she brushed past us to ask him where her friend was, we didn’t stop her.”
“What happened?” Kellum asked.
Mariam turned to him. “Nothing. Nothing I saw anyway. One second she was asking him what he knew about her friend, the next she fell backward like he’d punched her.”
Danic stiffened and growled next to her. “He punched her?!”
“No,” she said, her dark hair swaying as she shook her head. “He couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. She stood over him, glowering down on him, and he lifted his eyes to meet hers. Slowly, with purpose. What happened next… I can’t be sure I even saw it.”
“What?” I asked, desperate for every detail.
“I could have sworn I saw a flicker in his eyes, a flicker of sanity. Of normalcy. Maybe even regret. But that’s impossible.” She waved her hand like she was swatting at an annoying gnat.
I could see Levan’s eyes tilting up to meet mine. I saw hatred in his eyes, the same that had been there during their entire interrogation, but then…a spark. Mariam was right. He’d blinked and the hatred had turned to something softer, like guilt. An
d then I’d been hit by a blinding light…
I gasped as the picture he’d launched into my mind finally materialized. My heart tried climbing out of my chest through my throat and a fine layer of sweat misted my skin.
“I remember,” I whispered, staring at nothing so I wouldn’t lose the image. They stared at me without speaking, waiting for me to explain.
“When he looked up at me… Mariam’s right. He felt guilty, but only for a split second. In that time, I saw Zoe.”
My guys all leaned forward, tensing up like they were getting ready for battle.
“Don’t get too excited,” I said, tempering their enthusiasm. “It was more like a snapshot than a vision. I had no interaction with her. She was sitting on the same mattress in the same room, but this time she had an extra blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She held a bowl of soup in her hands, and it looked about a thousand times better than the glop I’d seen her eating — or refusing to eat. A guard stood over her, but not the same one I saw before. This one was smiling down at her, and she was smiling back.”
“What do you suppose it means?” asked Hale.
I grimaced. “I’m not sure. It was obviously a real memory of Levan’s, but I have no idea how accurate it was. I certainly hope they’re treating her better than they were, but at the very least, now we know he really does know where Zoe’s being held.”
Danic cracked his knuckles, his eyes blazing bright and his jaw set. “When we go back to drop off Mariam, I’ll break his arms to make him talk.”
“If he even has arms to break,” Mariam said with an intoxicating laugh that sounded like a sweet little brook babbling through a meadow on a sunny summer day. “Knowing Luka, he might very well pull the melot’s arms clean off before we return.”
Kellum laughed at the macabre suggestion, but not just a polite chuckle. It sounded more organic, the kind of laugh you gave to someone who understood your particular brand of humor. The kind of laugh that spoke of chemistry and attraction.
Then it hit me. I’d passed out from the force of the image Levan had sent to me — or I’d found, whichever way it worked — and then I’d swam to the surface to see Kellum and Mariam, two of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, looking down at me. And suddenly I couldn’t unsee all their pretty, perfect babies. They’d have his eyes and her lustrous hair, his chiseled features and her killer body. Or the other way around if the baby was a boy.
